LINER NOTES: BULLY FOR BULSTRODE [1996-97]

1.    Airbag – Radiohead

2.    One of These Things First – Nick Drake

3.    God Only Knows – Beach Boys

4.    Cotton Dress – Catchers

5.    Gentle Tuesday – Primal Scream

6.    ABBA on the Jukebox – Trembling Blue Stars

7.    Come to Me – Bjork

8.    Picnic by the Motorway – Suede

9.    Travelling Light – Tindersticks

10.  Mile End – Pulp

11.  Father to a Sister of Thought – Pavement

12.  I Stopped Dancing – Marion

13.  Afrodisiac – Powder

14.  Storm Injector – Tiger

15.  Richard III – Supergrass

16.  That’s All You Need – Faces

17.  Movin’ On – Blur

18.  Bitter Sweet Symphony – The Verve

19.  She’s a Rainbow – The Rolling Stones

20.  Ooh La La – Faces

21.  Still Cold – Mazzy Star

22.  Happiness is a Warm Gun – The Beatles

23.  The Passenger – Iggy Pop

24.  Bad Behaviour – Super Furry Animals

Bonus Tracks:

25.  Piku – Chemical Brothers

26.  No Awareness – Dr Octagon

27.  Revenge of the Prophet (Part 5) – Jeru the Damaja

28.  Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain – DJ Shadow

Chronology does not determine the order, the tenor of the individual tracks does. Radiohead’s OK Computer was released in June 1997 yet its opening track is also Bully for Bulstrode’s, a compilation intended to reflect what I was listening to from August 1996 through to August 1997. Blur’s 'Movin' On' is taken from their eponymously titled album, released in February 1997, but I’ve included it as track 17. Tiger’s massively underrated album We are Puppets went on sale in November 1996. Suede’s Coming Up was issued in September of the same year. I’m not even sure when it was I committed this itinerary to tape but it could feasibly have been as late as 1998.

        These are the tunes I was listening to while living at 215 Bulstrode Avenue, the longest residential road I’ve ever lived upon. Ours was the house second along from its western approach. It took about 10 minutes to walk the street’s length, towards Hounslow Central tube station. In the other direction Hounslow West, which was pretty bleak, its meagre high street populated with fast food establishments and betting shops. In among them could be found a Morrison’s supermarket, Boots Chemist, Iceland, Blockbuster Video, maybe a carpet shop, and the Earl Haig (a flat-roofed pub best avoided). There was also an off-license that I can only assume offered some sort of deal on a four-pack of lager, because I’d happily walk the extra hundred-odd metres rather than buy my beer from the newsagent opposite the Windsor Castle. Our house backed onto the Piccadilly Line that in turn abutted onto Lampton Park, which was bigger than Inwood Park but with a similar sort of feel; not unpleasant in itself but displaying signs of licentious activity.

Post-university tension. I was still a student, having changed courses at the end of my second year, but the people I now lived with weren't: a feller who worked at HMV at Heathrow Airport, a girl we used to refer to as No Eyes because when she laughed you couldn’t really see her eyes (both had previously shared a house with the pretty girl across the road, who was by now my 'lady friend'), and the guy who passed out in Debenhams. We watched a lot of television. For breakfast/lunch, the fried egg sandwiches I’d formerly relied upon were replaced with Heinz Baked Beans with Pork Sausages, on toast. A slightly more tempered lifestyle came to pass, a cleaner, tidier living environment and a garden worth spending time in. The Windsor Castle was our local – not a bad pub – but we’d still venture into Hounslow, to The Chariot, The Noble Half or The Rifleman. The Bulstrode (Pub) was just at the end of the road but it was never much of an evening type of boozer, more a quick pint on a Saturday afternoon sort of place.

Epic walks to catch the tube into London, keeping in touch with the Hounslow diaspora. The former cohabitant from Brighton was now living in Tottenham, endlessly watching Apocalypse Now, listening to The Doors and trying to make movies. The guy with the tapes was residing in Islington with a trendier set (in his eyes, at least). The lad who used to beat me at snooker had moved back up to Batley, from whence he came. The chap who introduced me to Sarah Records was dossing in Hounslow somehwere with the girl who was a massive Blondie fan.

OK Computer is an overrated record. It is not as good as Radiohead’s second album – The Bends, which is also overrated in some quarters – but it is still a good album. Radiohead make good albums and sometimes great songs, but I don’t think they have recorded a record that could be described as great in the way that Forever Changes or Pet Sounds are, or even the way The Verve’s A Northern Soul almost is. Never mind, very few albums are genuinely great, but everything about 'Airbag' is just wonderful: the bass line, the off-the-beat drums, the shrill guitars, the vocals, the lyrics, the sentiment.

A dumped crate of vinyl outside of 129 Bulstrode Avenue, an implicit invitation to  help yourself. I was on my way into to London to meet my lady friend, probably to drink In The Crown on Brewer Street, but paused to take look at what was there. I came away with Bryter Layter by Nick Drake, who I’d heard was supposed to be rather good, prepared to stand the inconvenience of carrying the album around with me for the rest of the evening. It is rather good, and a Nick Drake revival of sorts was just around the corner.

People talk of Pet Sounds’ legacy, but how many albums really sound anything like it? And is not an insult to Brian Wilson’s talent to suggest that a record like Pet Sounds is so easily imitated? I’m not convinced that a lot of people appreciate it as much as they say they do, for it is quite an odd album. Only the brevity of the individual tracks makes it in any way palatable to the mainstream, otherwise why aren’t we all listening to Surf’s Up? But 'God Only Knows' is sublime. Unfortunately, after a session down the pub, the residents of 215 Bulstrode Avenue identified a similarity between its non-lexical vocables to those harmonised on the theme tune to Jim'll Fix It.

'Cotton Dress' by Catchers, 'Gentle Tuesday' by Primal Scream and 'ABBA on the Jukebox' by Trembling Blue Stars – all the work of the chap who got me into Sarah Records and The Pastels and Love. Trembling Blue Stars was Bobby Wratten’s latest project (formerly of The Field Mice). A tour de force of nostalgia and longing, 'ABBA on the Jukebox' might be his finest moment.

Bjork almost passed me by. I liked her first and second singles very much – 'Human Behaviour' and 'Venus as a Boy' – but I’d never bothered with the affiliated album, Debut. The drummer who worked at HMV had a copy and lent it to me.

I'd always been ambivalent towards Suede, but I liked their third album, Coming Up. It struck me as less histrionic and more concise than their previous efforts. I also began to find humour in singer Brett Anderson’s lyrics, and new keyboardist Neil Codling had good hair.

Tindersticks’ eponymously titled second album isn’t as good as their eponymously titled first but wasn’t as far off as the chap who got me into Sarah Records liked to make out. My brother bought it for me in 1995, and yet it somehow bypassed that year's compendium and instead made it onto this one. Save for the odd track, the first two Tindersticks' albums possess a quality that detaches them in my mind from any specific time and place. My Cornish friend who passed out in Debenhams alighted upon the song 'Travelling Light' after we'd moved to Bulstrode Avenue, and so a connection was made, just as it had been with 'Marbles' three years earlier.

'Mile End' was on the soundtrack to Trainspotting, a movie synonymous with Britpop, and was as good as anything off of Pulp’s last LP. Pulp were anomalous. Their music owed nothing to the mod-rock revivalism or new-wave pop of their peers, yet visually they were the most ardently retrospective and distinctive group of the whole movement. They had more in common with a band like Saint Etienne, or even Suede, but Pulp’s success staked them as bedfellows to Oasis and Blur. Jarvis Cocker was that strange thing: a plebeian aesthete who appealed to the both the arty crowd and the man on the street.

As with The Fall, The Sounds of Baden Pearce could very well have included many songs by the band Pavement, with three albums to pick from: Slanted and Enchanted; Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain; and the compilation of EP tracks and singles Westing (By Musket and Sextant). Pavement’s third album proper, Wowee Zowee, was released in April 1995 but had again passed me by. The drummer employed at HMV had a recording of it, which he again lent to me.

  'I Stopped Dancing' by Marion and 'Afrodisiac' by Powder were included because I now had access to a video player and could watch my recorded copy of Britpop Now, originally broadcast 16/08/1995, at will. They are very good tunes by very average bands who none the less exuded a darker aesthetic than many of their Britpop-by-numbers contemporaries.

Tiger was a marvellous band, possibly ahead of the curve, maybe behind it, depending on your perspective. Unfortunately for them, enthusiasm for Oasis was at an all-time high; they’d just played Knebworth that August dressed up as the Happy Mondays, and the record buying public was in no mood for a band that appeared to take sartorial inspiration from 1980s comedy-drama Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.

Supergrass had effected an about face. Despite the inclusion of the catchy 'She’s so Loose' on Carrington Classics, I’d written them off as just another Britpop also-ran. Their second album, In It for the Money, was far heavier than their first. They’d also managed to reconstruct their image without resorting to either the laddish baggyisms of Oasis or the skateboarder chic of Blur. Nothing fancy: shirts, leather boots, simple T-shirts, straight-legged chords, all in muted shades.

The chap who introduced me to Sarah Records didn’t tend to like anything approximating heavy rock, but somehow the Faces avoided this charge. I expect it might have had something to do with the notion that the Faces didn't take themselves too seriously, as opposed to the impression conveyed via the earnest posturing of groups like Led Zeppelin or the camp theatricality of the Rolling Stones. On one of his rare Bulstrode visits, the chap brought around his copy of the double-album Best of the Faces, although the first disc was missing, which might be why he never asked for it back. The Faces evoked a certain melancholy congruent to the environment I was living in – the feeling we were living on the periphery of things, in limbo between Hounslows East and West. This might not make much sense if you're listening to 'That's All You Need' but may well do if it’s 'Ooh La La'.

Blur’s fifth LP was supposedly a reaction to their fourth, a conscious rejection of the populism they’d embraced and an attempt to reclaim the noisier ground of their youth (as Seymour, if you want proof). Blur has aged well but to claim it’s some sort of homage to American lo-fi indie music – as was proclaimed by the music press, and to some extent by the band itself – is complete nonsense. 'Look Inside America' carries on musically where 'End of the Century' left off. 'Beetlebum' sounds like Let it Be era Beatles. 'Strange News from Another Star' is 'Starman' meets 'The Bewlay Brothers' by David Bowie; 'Movin' On' is 'Queen Bitch'. Damon Albarn plays his Hammond organ like he’s working the end of a pier. It's all about as British as Blur get.

You couldn’t help but be taken with The Verve’s 'Bitter Sweet Symphony'. Unfortunately, the album that followed was effectively a dry run for Richard Ashcroft's career as a solo artiste. Turned out ‘Mad Richard’ wasn’t so mad after all, as the jittery, ragged character that inhabited both A Storm in Heaven and A Northern Soul was jettisoned and some blokeish balladeer materialised in its place. Nick McCabe’s guitar must have gently wept.

I wasn’t done with the sixties, hadn’t even scratched much past the surface. I picked up the Rolling Stones compilation Through the Past, Darkly (Big Hits Vol.2) on one of my excursions to Plymouth. I bought it for the tracks '2000 Light Years from Home' and 'Jumpin’ Jack Flash' because I wanted them on vinyl. I didn’t actually own any Stones’ records at this point and had been getting by on a taped copy of Hot Rocks 1964–1971 since my first year of university. I was still listening to The Beatles but not so much. The former cohabitant from Brighton dropped by and I put on 'The White Album' at his request. It can't have been the first time we'd listened to this record together, but 'Happiness Is a Warm Gun' had us in hysterics. I think it was McCartney and Harrison's doo-wop backing vocals during the final section that did it.

A few years before the film Trainspotting came along to remind people of Iggy Pop’s existence, there was Passengers, a ‘youth TV’ show on Channel 4 which used Iggy Pop’s 'The Passenger' as its theme tune. I never saw it but imagine it made for pretty bad television, as these things often do. At the time, I was only vaguely aware of Iggy Pop’s place in punk and alternative music’s canon – his band The Stooges and the close musical partnership with David Bowie during the late 1970s. After Trainspotting, and the re-release of 'Lust for Life' off the back of it, Pop’s contribution came to the fore and people like me started putting his songs on their mixtapes.

Super Furry Animals because they made a loud noise, The Chemical Brothers because some of this big beat stuff was all right really and Fatboy Slim left me cold.

The Rifleman

1996 was the year that I reacquainted myself with the Beastie Boys, by way of the albums Ill Communication, Check Your Head and Paul's Boutique. I had also been exposed to Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), which seemed to me an improvement upon the product offered by Snoop Doggy Dog, Dr. Dre, Notorious B.I.G. and the like. At any rate, my fondness for the genre was stirred, and by the end of the year I’d acquired Wrath of the Math by Jeru the Damaja, Dr. Octagon’s debut album (the Mo’ Wax edition), and Entroducing by DJ Shadow, which I'd been introduced to in the Embassy Rooms in Islington drinking with the guy with the tapes on a Sunday afternoon.

[Listen to here.]

STADIA: LOFTUS ROAD AND KENILWORTH ROAD

A chair was hurled against the window, which quivered on impact. The line of policeman stood outside The Green did not see fit to enter the pub and merely held formation, censureless.

Certain fans of Plymouth Argyle Football Club had chosen to drink there on account of the name The Green reflecting the colour of the shirts that Plymouth Argyle play in. The Green had been invaded by The Green Army. We drank our pints swiftly, for although we too were supporters of Plymouth Argyle, the launching of furniture towards plate glass fenestrations was not something that particularly interested us. Moreover, the group of people from whence the chair had emanated were surely capable of lobbing chairs in other directions too. In spite of our shared desire to see Plymouth Argyle defeat Queens Park Rangers, the sort of mind that sees fit to toss around furnishings in confined spaces does not tend to discriminate.

Loftus Road in Shepherd’s Bush is a favourite stadium of mine. Unfortunately, the locality has rather a harsh reputation. The gloomy West 12 shopping precinct might have something to do with it, and the West Cross Route is grimmer still. Embedded betwixt Hammersmith, Acton, White City, Notting Hill and Kensington, Shepherd’s Bush can feel squeezed. Shepherd’s Bush Green itself, at its centre, is airy and arboreal, and much of the surrounding housing dates back to the late 19th century – Victorian terraces mainly, which is no bad thing. Still, the environment at Loftus Road is a physical hindrance, prohibiting expansion and limiting development.

Practically speaking, Loftus Road reached its extremity when QPR concurrently rebuilt the School End and Loftus Road stands in 1980 and ’81 respectively. Loftus Road backs onto terraced housing, while the School End overlooks a school – Jack Tizard School precisely. Built in 1972, the Ellerslie Road Stand, on Ellerslie Road, is encumbered with similarly residential concerns. Finally, The South Africa Road Stand (1968/69) is hampered by both its namesake and the four storey structure that has been tacked on its rear, as functional in its appearance as its purpose dictates: office space.

The overall impression is of rectangular cuboids and of the colour blue. The ground is almost as straightforward as this crude reduction suggests. The South Africa Road Stand is its centre piece, a tidy two-tiered structure with a single row of executive boxes in between and an outward appearance that belies its age. It is of ‘post and beam’ construction, but the posts – one at each end and two equidistantly between – are relatively unobtrusive. The Ellerslie Road Stand opposite is similarly supported but offers just one tier. It is the least remarkable stand of the four but by no means unattractive. The School End and Loftus Road are virtually identical and also the most interesting. They comprise of two tightly packed overhung tiers almost running the width of the entire ground. Their roofs converge with those of the South Africa and Ellerslie Road stands, not seamlessly but coherently enough to present the stadium as a single entity. That the fasciae are all painted the same shade of blue augments this impression. The stadium is completely enclosed, and the boundary between the stands and the pitch is contiguous. Incidental features include a video screen mounted above the School End, a television gantry suspended below the roof of the Ellerslie Road Stand, and four elegantly slim floodlight pylons emanating from behind the School and Loftus Road ends.

Problem: a limited capacity of 18,439. For the last forty odd years Queens Park Rangers have oscillated consistently between the top two strata of the English football league. Currently competing in the second, they’re averaging an attendance of between 14 and 15,000. If they were to be promoted this capacity would be found wanting. It is reasonable, then, that QPR are examining the possibility of relocating to Old Oak Common with the intention of building a new ground with room enough for 40,000 fans. This sort of thing takes time. Should QPR face relegation, rather than promotion, these plans will more than likely be shelved. In such an event, their fans can console themselves with their continued residency at Loftus Road.

The football hooligan is afflicted with what could be described as ‘combat envy’ – a sort of collective guilt for having not fought in the Second World War. Aware of the horrors that became his ancestors, the hooligan wishes to atone in some way, but not to the extent that he’ll join the actual army and put himself in any substantive danger. The sacrificial element intrinsic to combat does not interest him. He considers only his reputation: that people might think he somehow isn’t up to the job of his forebears, that he’s not ‘hard enough'.

However, the thug does not aspire towards meting out random acts of violence upon disinterested parties. Instead, the mob – or ‘firm’ in football parlance – will simultaneously seek out pitched battles with complicit rival factions while also engaging the local constabulary with impertinent acts of antagonism. Indeed, if the police presence is significant enough, or sufficiently equipped, the respective firms may enter into coalition and direct their aggression solely towards the state apparatus. In this sense, the thug supporter sees himself more as some sort of fifth columnist. The role being played is not one of an occupying force – even when brawling at home – but of insurgent, guerrilla, or terrorist.

One should appreciate that the British police officer is not a gendarme: his or her role is primarily that of keeper of the peace. This plays perfectly into the deranged fantasy of the yob. As tensions rise, it can be imagined that the uniformed police are in fact infantry – a modern day Wehrmacht – whereas the firm is some sort of people’s army fighting against the odds, in civvies (but completely free from the threat of long term incarceration – or ‘disappearing’). If in Britain there existed something approximating Italy’s Carabinieri, these naive re-enactments would take on a much darker and improbable dimension. When the Metropolitan Police (or Waffen-SS for the sake of the metaphor) are involved, they sometimes do. Yet this is no incitement to riot but merely an opportunity for the deconstructed idiot to exhibit in front of his mates, cosy up to a horse and protest innocence when the mounted police officer tells him in no uncertain terms to back off. Then, as the fans are marshalled to the ground as a collective, the mob will sing about how they’ll never capitulate to the IRA – official, provisional, continuity, or otherwise.

Kenilworth Road is as confined as Loftus Road, but with added eccentricities. Comprised of five separate stands, the shape delineated is actually of an irregular hexagon. The A505 (Hatters Way) and the Luton to Dunstable Busway interrupts the Main Stand at an acute angle, and the crooked David Preece Stand fills in the gap awkwardly. It has the appearance of a diminutive two-tiered structure that’s been bent in the middle and had the lower tier removed (to provide access). It holds 711 spectators.

The Bobbers Stand is odder still, comprised of what passes for executive boxes. Whose idea was this? It was never a very big stand on account of the housing behind, although it used to accommodate 1,539 seated supporters. I have not been able to find out how many it seats now but it can’t be much more than a few hundred.

The Oak Road Stand (capacity 1,800) and the strangeness doesn’t let up. Its roof, pitched, is comprised of three staggered sections that rise in height to meet the Main Stand to its right. The entrance occupies what at one point must have been the ground floors of two neighbouring terraced houses, yet the top floors, and the front doors leading to them, remain intact. Once the fan has passed under these tenements they must climb a set of stairs that offer an intimate view of the terraced gardens either side. (Loftus Road’s surroundings appear boundless by comparison.)

Then there’s the Main Stand, which isn’t without eccentricity either. It appears at first glance fairly cohesive, but not only does it have to put up with the David Preece Stand’s clumsy incursion on its territory, three floodlight pylons blight the lower terrace. These aren’t the spindly stanchions incorporated so successfully at Loftus Road but more substantial latticed steel affairs. The club’s offices and utilities and the Nick Owen and Eric Morecambe suites are built on the back.

Finally, there’s the Kenilworth Stand, which has a flat roof, 3,229 seats, no significant visual encumbrances and room enough for a carpark out the front.

Kenilworth Road, looking from the Oak Road Stand, the Bobbers Stand to the left.

The stadiums of early antiquity were nothing more than acclivities with the ground levelled before them. These grassy verges were later fashioned into actual terraces, but they were still built upon naturally sloping land – there was no exterior to speak of. Practically speaking, it was the Romans who built the first freestanding amphitheatres, radically changing how such structures presented themselves. From possessing just one functional aspect, the stadium now possessed three: the façade, the interior, and the cavea.

This multi-dimensional perspective does not normally apply. Where form follows function, a building’s relationship with itself is more usually binary, symbiotic. Its innards cater to its functionality – a place to sleep, eat, work, etc. – and the external walls are present by default, to bear the roof and to demarcate the territory. The same cannot be said of the stadium, where the inside is outside too because what goes on inside is taking place outside. Its exterior then is continuous: it can be interpreted as both its inward and outward appearance. In its rawest form, what might be referred to as the stadium’s walls are in fact the underside of the cavea: they are not designed to protect this exposed internality but to physically uphold it. (Where an actual interior is present it is subservient to the building as a whole, providing toilets, ticket offices, changing rooms and other extraneous utilities. In this respect, the stadium is comparable to the railway station.)

Unlike those early auditoriums of antiquity (or even some of the Soviet ‘superbowls’ that were dug into the earth after the Second World War: Warsaw’s 10th-Anniversary Stadium; the Kirov Stadium in St Petersburg) Loftus and Kenilworth Road are freestanding structures. Except, so hemmed in are they, if you tore their floodlights down you might struggle to find them. There are no boulevards, concourses, squares, parks, or any other types of open space from which to view these buildings as independent structures. But where one can ascertain an external presence at QPR – if you look for it – it’s a real struggle at Luton. From Ivy, Beech and Clifton roads, one encounters fragments of breeze blocked walls and corrugated steel, random brickwork and wooden doors, peeling paint and corroded air-conditioning units. For all the onlooker knows, they’ve come up against something like an industrial estate or the back-end of a bingo hall.

I do not mean to disparage Kenilworth Road. A football ground can live with a shabby exterior, the atmosphere within unaffected; who is to say that a stadium’s aesthetic appeal rests upon the ability to perceive it from a variety of angles. I suppose the problem for many of these smaller grounds is the uncertain choices that their clubs face: to move on, redevelop, or settle for what they’ve got. And if move on, then where to?

[This article also features in The Football Pink.]